ISRO Chairman K. Sivan on Sunday confirmed that the space agency has located the moon lander Vikram on the lunar surface, after having lost communication with it on Saturday.
Sivan said that Indian Space Research Organisation has received a photograph of the lander of the Chandrayaan 2 mission on the lunar surface. The orbiter of Chandrayaan 2 has taken a thermal image of the lander.
The ISRO chief said that Vikram must have had a hard-landing. He added that it is unclear if the Vikram module was damaged during the hard-landing on the moon's surface.
The image taken by the orbiter shows the lander a few metres away from the intended landing site.
Communication links with the lander, however, are yet to be established. Efforts are on to re-establish contact with the lander as the ISRO continues to analyse data.
The lander was just 2.1 km from the lunar surface at last record before it stopped transmitting its signal during the final phase of its descent.
ISRO was to make history with the world’s first moon landing near the lunar South Pole. Vikram was supposed to touchdown on the moon's surface around 2 am IST on September 7, followed by the rollout of the rover Pragyan between 5.30 am and 6.30 am. However, communication from the lander to the ground station was lost during the final descent. Only 20 out of 32 missions to soft-land a spacecraft on to the moon had succeeded.
